


Gotta wear pants, babe

by thefriendlyvandal



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Pneumonia, SCP-408 - Freeform, Sickfic, Workaholicism, also being a level 4 in the scp foundation is HELL, dont u love the smell of increasing whump in the morning, draven kondraki - Freeform, hi welcome to trash mountain i hope u enjoy ur stay, i hope so, i wish i could come up with a more cool and artistic title but whatever, lmao is he gonna become an Ao3 tag now, probably going to continue this bc im trash so im just gonna say this chapter 1 out of ?, scp 408 is good and pure
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2018-12-24 15:54:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12016071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefriendlyvandal/pseuds/thefriendlyvandal
Summary: Benjamin Kondraki has had better days.EDIT 10/14/2018: blease only read chapter 3 of this, the first two chapters are sooooo fucking bad and they need a rewrite tbh im so sorry





	1. Doing fine

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:11**

hey 

Hey are you tehre

*there

When are you gonna be home

**Alto Clef | 20:23**

I have no idea lol

Shits going late

Why?

Are you ok? 

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:24**

Yeah no im fine!! 

Its just like

Im out of my meds

**Alto Clef | 20:25**

I picked them up for you last night, remember?

Should be on the counter

One white pill twice a day, two blue capsules once a day, both are antibiotics so dont fuck with that shit please

Doctor also said no coffee or alcohol like straight up please. PLEASE dont get yourself fucked up on shit for a few days okay? 

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:26**

Oh

Yeah no i remember that part

**Alto Clef | 20:26**

How are you feeling?

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:27**

Im doing fine 

Like dont get me wrong i dont want to move and i feel like dying but

Im awake now

**Alto Clef | 20:27**

Okay cool 

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:27**

Please like

Just dont stay too late

**Alto Clef | 20:27**

Ben.

If you want me to come home

Just tell me 

And i will come home

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:27**

No its fine!! Its totally fine like i get it

**Alto Clef | 20:28**

Ben.

Are you really okay?

I mean it like this is heavy shit, you’re really sick. Like, you could have died. 

Do you want me to come home?

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:28**

I’m fine babe 

really im okay i just had a nightmare 

**Alto Clef | 20:29**

Was it bad?

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:29**

It shook me up a little but im okay

Just another fever dream thing 

**Alto Clef | 20:30**

Ben

Im coming home okay

Just hang tight for a minute and ill be there

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:29**

You dont need to come home im fine!!

**Alto Clef | 20:30**

Ben its fine

Youre super sick okay like

Even if youre okay i wanna make sure youre okay

  Because sometimes you do this shit thing where you say youre okay and youre not

 

He was in tears. 

Kondraki pushed himself further back into the closet, wheezing painfully. He felt stupid, but felt heat crawling through his skin in an uncomfortable haze, felt the deep pain in his lungs, the tiredness in every bone in his body. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to stay awake. 

 

He  _ needed _ to stay awake.

 

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:30**

Please hurry 

 

Something was out there. Something was out there. 

His heart slammed in his chest, making him wheeze and sweat wildly. His phone buzzed in his hands, and he looked down in the dark. 

 

**Alto Clef | 20:31**

I will

Deep breaths 

Youre okay

 

Ben swallowed, then launched into a coughing fit that wracked his frame and left him reeling, breathing heavy, sweating, out of breath. Dizzy. Weak.  _ Vulnerable _ , said something in his head. He pushed his fingers through his hair- matted with sweat, curled with bed head- then rubbed his face, heart racing. 

 

**Benjamin Kondraki | 20:30**

I mmean it please come irght now

**Alto Clef | 20:31**

I’m leaving right now babe

Its okay you’re fine

Everythings okay

  
  


Deep breaths.  _ You have to calm down, you’re panicking (again) you’re panicking and there’s nothing to panic about, you NEED to calm down and BREATHE  _ (he wheezes, sharply)  _ BREATHE, BREATHE.  _ Ben’s chest feels like it's being squeezed, tight and painful. There’s a moment when he exhales a thin sob, and he rubs his face and thinks  _ BREATHE, YOU NEED TO BREATHE  _ because he  _ CAN'T,  _ his whole body is screaming  _ PLEASE STOP!! I JUST WANT THIS TO END!!  _ And it doesn’t. It doesn’t for what feels like forever. He feels stupid, self conscious, childish but also afraid, losing breath, sick. 

  
  


Someone was yelling his name. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to breathe, he  _ can’t fucking breathe _ \-- he starts coughing instead, air scraping the inside of lungs, air pipe raw, sides heaving, thinking  _ am i bleeding? Am i bleeding? Am i bleeding?  _ It hurts so much, like some kind of raw, unforgiving ache, sharp like glass and melting into the same kind of sickening, creeping heat that’s been encompassing his body since he started coughing three weeks ago. He’s just so  _ tired  _ of it at this point, gasping for air, terrified,  _ please, I’m going to suffocate-- _

The door handle turns, and had he been healthy, Ben would have taken this opportunity to prepare himself for a fight. But he doesn’t. He sits on the tile floor of the kitchen closet and wheezes painfully, sweat rolling down the back of his neck, bones tired, chest tired, eyes tired. He pulls his legs into his chest and buries his face in them, avoiding the light, trying to ignore the fact that he's  _ crying,  _ he's been  _ crying this whole time and he’s still sobbing.  _

 

“Oh, thank god.”

 

Ben swallows at the voice, sore throat grating. He’s too tired to respond.

 

“Hey. Hey, look at me.” 

 

There’s a hand rubbing his shoulder now. Kondraki was never one to cry in front of others, but it was pretty damn late to stop that now that he’d been sobbing in fear for the past twenty minutes. He doesn’t look up. Maybe it’s something to do with vanity, or being masculine, or being just too fucking sick to want to interact with another person, including his boyfriend, but he doesn’t, and when he starts coughing again- tired, weak coughs that do nothing but hurt- Clef comes closer, coming halfway into the closet to rub his trembling back. 

 

“Look at me, asshole. Come on.” The tone of his voice is endearing, even if the words themselves aren’t. This was just how Alto operated. It felt familiar. Safe. 

 

“You’re okay.” 

 

Kondraki gives a shaky exhale, throat lurching in a cough he suppresses. The coughing fit means he still doesn’t have the breath to respond, and when he does look up, sides heaving, sweat knotting black hair together and coating his body in a thin sheen, he can’t bring himself to make eye contact. This was stupid. This was so, so stupid. He feels like a child, but feels too sick and terrified to act like anything but. He swallows. Shuts his eyes. Alto brushes some hair out of his eyes, including the dark strands stuck to his forehead, and he leans his head on the wall. 

 

“I’m sorry.” His voice is soft and hoarse, and cracks when he uses it. 

 

“Don’t be.” Replies Alto, rubbing a thumb over his shoulder. “That must have been some dream.” 

 

Ben pushes the heel of one palm into his eyes trying to rub some sense into them, or to get the tears out of them, or to do something that might stop the shame he feels from burning in his gut. “...What?” 

 

“The lamp?” 

 

Ben rubs his forehead, finally bringing himself to look over at his boyfriend directly. Alto is sitting cross-legged on the floor, knees brushing Kondraki’s calves. He’s still in a T-shirt and jeans from work, and looks a hell of a lot better than Kondraki, who has spent the past three days in the same torn grey sweatpants and baggy shirt. The features differentiating between this outfit and his own work clothes were, of course, close to none; he had come home at 1am from the most miserable hospital visit of his life, thrown on whatever clef had handed him to wear, and collapsed into bed in a feverish heat, and that had been that. 

 

“...What lamp?”

 

Clef gave him a somewhat perplexed, if not unsurprised look, and flicked a thumb towards the bedroom. 

 

“The lamp. You broke the lamp.” 

 

“...The green one?” 

 

Clef nodded, and Ben sighed, closing his eyes again. 

 

“...Don’t remember that…”

 

“Like, it’s fine, it doesn’t look like you marked the wall up or anything. Just kind of freaked me out when I walked in there, you know?” There’s an edge of concern in Alto’s voice that comes in reaction to anything Kondraki does while waking up from a nightmare, and had he been well, Ben would have been equally concerned. But he starts coughing again instead, weaker this time, and Alto waits a moment until he’s done before speaking. 

 

“You sound like shit.” 

 

He nods absentmindedly and swallows. 

 

“Feel...like shit.” He heaves out, still catching breath. 

 

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Look, you think you can get back to sleep? If you went back to bed, I mean.” 

 

Kondraki opens his eyes and flicks them over at the bedroom door across the apartment, left ajar. He could see the bed, the five or six blankets he’d been bundled up in, the little shards of green ceramic on the floor. Fear twitches in his chest, still amped up from whatever hellish nightmare he’d woken from a half hour ago. He shakes his head no. 

 

“That’s good, because there’s glass all over in there.” Alto remarks absentmindedly. “I’ll clean it up, but let’s get you to the couch first.” 

 

Ben groans in mild resistance. 

“Come on, sicko. Up.” Alto puts one arm under one of Ben’s and pulls upward, and there’s a moment, when he stands, that the blood rushes from his head and he feels dizzy and nauseous. Alto starts pulling him forward once it’s clear to both of them he isn’t going to fall. 

 

“Why don’t you have to…” Kondraki lets the half-argument sit in the air without completion, more out of the sake of arguing than an act of resistance. 

 

“Well, I’m not the one with pneumonia, am I?” Clef clips sharply, and Ben rolls his eyes at the tone, because he knew  _ why  _ his boyfriend was being like that: because Clef had told him to get his cough looked at one week in, and he had said he was fine, and then told him multiple times two weeks in, and he had said he was fine, and three weeks in Ben had stood up from a chair in a meeting and fainted, and that was just the way Ben was going to be for his entire life; curiosity killed the cat. Pushing to the limit and sometimes not quite shooting the moon.  _ How bad was a cold going to get, anyway? _ Well, now he knew, and would stand by that investigation despite its utter stupidity and disastrous result, god damn it.

Alto sees his eye roll and smiles slightly. “Shit, Ben, I’m just teasing. Come on.” 

 

“Sure you are.” He wheezes, falling onto the couch and immediately covering his eyes with the crook of his elbow. He hears Alto pad off into the bedroom, the distinctiveness of  _ his  _ footsteps. He’s memorized them on carpet, on tile, on wood, his slight limp on rainy days. Not as much of a sappy thing as it was a utility; better to see who’s coming to his office at 1am. They pad back in a second, the sound of his work shoes on carpeting. If he was a romantic, this would mean more to him, but right now it just means  _ you are safe  _ and  _ I am here  _ and  _ I’m going to protect you and support you and take care of you even though you’re an idiot just like you do for me. _

 

“Here. Put this on.” Fabric hits Ben’s chest and he removes his elbow, blinking in the soft glow of the kitchen light. 

 

“What?” His brain is hazy, his thoughts trail back and lag behind. 

 

“...It’s a shirt?” Clef defines it for him, because although Ben is holding it in his hands now he’s too tired to function properly enough for a simple identification of a clothing item. “Ben. Look at yourself.”

 

He blinks hard and looks down to find that his shirt is plastered to his body with sweat. He wonders absentmindedly at what point in his panic he accomplished this feat- pre or post lamp breakage- and it’s at this point when Alto sighs and says, “You know, on second thought, do you think you can take a shower?”. 

 

Ben takes a moment to reflect on what he probably looks like. Eyes red from crying, pale, shaky, covered in layers of feverish sweat. He doesn’t  _ want  _ to take a shower- isn’t sure exactly what he wants to do at all- but he probably needs it. 

 

“Come on, you’ll feel better once you’re clean. Yeah?” Alto remarks. 

 

Ben hates it when he’s right. He sighs and nods, hating that he’ll have to stand back up- his body wants to never leave the couch again- and once he’s on his feet, he looks at the floor, then back at Alto. 

 

“Hey.” He rasps. “How much did they say I could drink?” 

 

“Well, you’re already dehydrated. I’d say as much as you can, if you think you can keep something do-”

“ _ No,  _ babe. I mean.” He runs one hand through his hair. “How much can I  _ drink.”  _

 

The silence is palpable. He feels like crying again, but the  _ need  _ is there, because the  _ need  _ is always there these days and has been for a long time. Ben doesn’t look up from the ground, because he knows Alto is staring at him with a mix of disappointment and concern. 

 

“...I’m really sorry, I-”

 

“No, I get it. I get it. I’ve been there.” Clef’s voice feels hard. “It’s just. Look, that’s just gonna dehydrate you more than you already are, and you shouldn’t be doing that to your body right now-”

 

“ _ Please,  _ Alto.” His voice cracks painfully, and he swallows. “ _ Please _ .” 

 

Clef doesn’t respond right away. He feels disgusting. He doesn’t look up. There are a million things he wish he could do to stop this, and he can’t bring himself to do any of them.  _ You’re letting it control you,  _ he hears in his mind, some therapist he had years ago for a short while.  _ You have a problem when you let it control you.  _ There are tears back in Ben’s eyes; maybe it’s because he’s too tired to fight it. Maybe it’s because he’s just a selfish prick. 

 

“Well,” Alto sighs. “Look. Just a little, okay? I’m not gonna let you black out. Just enough so you don’t go through full withdrawal right now.” 

 

He nods, playing with the drawstring of his sweatpants. “...Doesn’t need to be a lot.” 

 

Clef notices the tears running down his face, and puts one hand on his shoulder blade with a light smile. “No coffee though.”

 

Kondraki lets out a nervous laugh that rasps in his throat. “No. No coffee.” He swallows and looks up to make eye contact. “Almost worse than the alcoholism.”

 

Alto smiles genuinely at that. 

 

“I would hug you, but you’re disgusting.” 

 

Ben nods, still smiling weakly, tears rolling down his face. “Y-yeah. Yeah. No. I get it.” 

 

Clef grabs the clean shirt from where he left it on the couch and hands it back to him. 

 

“Go. Shower. I’ll get some other clean shit for you to put on.” 

 

“S-sure I can’t wear just the shirt?” 

 

“No. Gotta wear pants, babe. Pants are good. Civilized people wear pants.” 

 

“...’Y act...like I’m gonn...gonna see the fuckin queen…” He’s shaking now with a thin smile on his face, crying harder for god knows whatever reason, but Clef snorts with laughter and shoves him lightly. 

 

“Go shower, Ben.” 

 


	2. Just Visiting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Work never really ends.

**Draven Kondraki | 20:11**

Hey

Hows dad doing

Sorry i havent responded in a few days shit picked up

**Alto Clef | 20:23**

One hospital visit later, It’s pneumonia

**Draven Kondraki | 20:24**

Fuck

Is he okay?

‘hospital visit’???

 

**Alto Clef | 20:25**

Discombobulated mostly but he’s home and sleeping rn

He passed out in a meeting after you left

Hospital kept him overnight and then put him on med leave

For a week or so

**Draven Kondraki | 20:26**

Med leave???

hes gonna hate that holy shit

 

**Alto Clef | 20:26**

Oh dont worry he does

The meds have a narcotic element though

So he’s been knocked out pretty solidly so far tonight

You wouldnt believe it its like a dream

 

**Draven Kondraki | 20:27**

Is he gonna be okay? 

**Alto Clef | 20:27**

Yeah, part of it is just exhaustion i think

He’s got a week off now to get over the worst of it

 

**Draven Kondraki | 20:27**

I should be home soon 

I’ll be over when i get back 

Whether he likes it or not

 

* * *

 

 

Ben wakes up and immediately feels like he’s been hit by a truck. 

 

One who works in a high level position in the Foundation is bound to become accustomed to several interesting varieties of the “being hit by a truck” feeling. There’s the hit-by-a-truck feeling he’s become most accustomed to over the years, whenever he becomes sober enough to feel hungover (a rarity; he spends most of his time drinking hair of the dog). A close second would be the post-breach hit-by-a-truck feeling; the feeling of waking up with your body aching from adrenaline withdrawal with sheer exhaustion and grief forming a stone in your chest. Hell, he’s been hit by an actual truck during a particularly eventful week in the field. But  _ this  _ sensation- the feeling of being too sick to move but having a position necessitating coming in anyway hit-by-a-truck sensation- is something he dreads incessantly. The feverish crawl under his skin and the unrelenting stress of the site’s command center create an experience not unlike being slowly waterboarded, and in the past month of denying his being sick it’s taken an awful lot of restraint and over the counter medication- not to mention booze- to not throttle and scream or curl up and cry. It’s the sensation of  _ one more fucking thing happening,  _ the sensation of  _ one more piece of shit I have to deal with,  _ and the sensation of  _ I’m weak and tired and I want to go home but have too much fucking shit to do and am gonna have to pull another all nighter instead,  _ and as much as he hated the fever dreams and medications and fainting in front of a room of postdocs he has to admit that he would rather die right now than be in the central command room, or in his office, or in the lab, or generally anywhere other than here, now, in an actual bed with the lights turned off. 

 

He feels like he’s been hit by a truck, but at least he feels like he’s been hit by a truck and isn’t having to strut around pretending like he didn’t. For that, he’s forever in debt to Clef for carefully picking his way through the red tape paperwork of Level 4 medical leave for him during the night Ben spent curled in a fetal position on a hospital bed, hacking up a lung and being poked and prodded by doctors, because goddamn if he wouldn’t have gone back to work the next day otherwise. Site-17 had many level 4’s, Clef included, but only one Director. It was a job that required constant attention. 

 

Which brings him to moments after realizing that he felt the worst he had felt in years, sitting up in bed, laptop open. The light hurts his head and stuns him, and it’s a full five seconds before he realizes that he can’t make out a damned thing on the screen.

 

_ Glasses.  _

 

Kondraki reaches out again, this time to the nightstand instead of the backpack on the floor beside him. The thick black frames are folded up neatly when he finds them, an indication that it was Clef who removed them last; Kondraki, being the alcoholic he was, found it a puzzle of coordination to do much other than throw them to the side before sleeping. 

 

There’s a brief moment before his computer syncs that he feels at peace. Ben hadn’t checked his email since about an hour before fainting, where he had managed to get his inbox down to 80 or so; a reasonable accomplishment considering how much he felt like complete shit recently. When the page connects and refreshes, Ben can’t help but roll his eyes at his inbox. 900+ unread, which was low, concerning he was site Director- obviously some of the normal workload had been redirected to the other Level 4s on site- but to Kondraki, drugged on codeine cough suppressant and a 103 degree fever, it was a highly formidable opponent. 

 

He started by storting by the ones with [URGENT] in the subject line, and clicking on the oldest. Yes, it was pretty bad that some of them were three days old at this point, but the site was still standing and he hadn’t awoken with his phone, pager, bluetooth earpiece, and walkie-talkie blaring all at once at 3AM, so in Ben’s experience it meant that the site was taking his sudden absence and the accompanying administrative confusion relatively well. 

 

He stared at the screen blankly for a moment. Briefly, he might have considered the effect alcohol would have with the antibiotics and assortment of other medications he was currently on, before deciding that 1. alcohol was a medication too, damn it, and 2. One had to be drunk to some degree to reply to any amount of emails over 15 at a time and fuck it if he was a quitter. Ben reaches back into the backpack again, this time reaching into the front pocket and fumbling until his hand closes around the neck of a bottle. Did he feel bad about drinking while sick in bed? Hell no. Did he feel bad about drinking because Clef had quit a long time ago, long before they started dating, and he really should catch up? Also, hell no. Did he feel bad about the look of mild concern and surprisingly genuine disappointment on Clef’s face when he came home and drank an entire bottle of cheap vodka in one sitting, like he was doing now-

 

-in the bed they shared-

 

-while sick-

 

-after Clef said not to with that strangely blank and tired tone that he only used with Ben? 

 

_ Maybe,  _ Ben thinks, as he opens the bottle and starts on the first email. He did, to an extent, because it was Clef, and Clef cared about him, and he cared about Clef, too.  _ Maybe,  _ Ben thinks, when he drinks half the bottle in an hour and that’s a slow rate for him.  _ Maybe,  _ Ben thinks, when he finishes it off in a feverish haze 145 emails in feeling arguably shittier than he had before. He slides it back in his backpack to be disposed of somewhere Clef wouldn’t find it later, and knows that it’s even shittier because Clef  _ knew,  _ Clef fucking  _ knew,  _ had known for all the years they’d been together that he drank and did so heavily and the only reason he hid the bottle at all was so he might not have to see Clef look at him with a bored, blank expression, the one that said  _ I can’t believe you, Kon, I really can’t, because drinking doesn’t make you happy and doesn’t make your life any better and you know that it doesn’t.  _

 

He’s 300 emails in when the cough medicine and pain relievers start to wear off. His chest had felt tight and breath short the whole time he had been awake, but it’s only now that he feels hyper aware of the sharp pains that prick his trachea when he breathes, the throbbing at his temples, the thin wheeze his lungs make when he inhales. At 400 emails, he can’t believe his short responses of ‘Yes’ ‘No’ and ‘Not my problem, ask X person’ are even still coherent, and he finishes them at half the rate when he starts coughing again and this time the fits take his breath away and shoot pain in thin, tight lines around his chest. At 425 emails completed, Ben finds himself regretting the past 20 years of chain smoking for making him so vulnerable to chest infections, not that that would stop him, and at 450 he’s changed his mind and is officially considering quitting so he would never have to face this hell ever again, but being the stubborn man Benjamin Kondraki is it’s not until 460 emails sent that he feels himself staring blankly at a simple question sent to him by a Level 3 regarding funding delegations and calls it, slamming shut the laptop lid in tired frustration. People were  _ stupid. _ This site was  _ stupid.   _

 

This job was so, so  _ stupid.  _

 

He rubs his face, fingers dragging on 5 o’clock shadow. So  _ stupid,  _ god fucking damn it, it’s so  _ stupid;  _ he lets his fingers knot in his hair, curled with bedhead, grey around the edges.  

 

_ Ugh.  _

 

Ben sets his laptop aside and collapses back into the pillows, drained, frayed, anxiety gnawing at the rough edges of his being.  _ Fucking job. Fucking...never ends.  _

 

It never seemed to end.  _ It never, ever, ever… _

 

Chills shudder down his spine and Ben shivers. 

 

... _ ever, ever, ever, ever ends… _

 

Ben spends the next few hours in a hazy dose, somewhere between sleeping and waking. His body aches and trembles in chills and he somehow lets himself submit to it, letting the fever crawl under his skin and his head throb. Not having to drug himself into oblivion with shitty cold medicine and then crawl to work was a fucking blessing, and when his cell phone rings he jolts awake only physically, following a kind of vague habit of grabbing the phone/pager/intercom/bluetooth/blackberry/computer first and asking questions later when the fire is put out or the bodies are wrapped up or whatever hellish thing he’s being called for is taken care of, but before he can reach out a hand to fumble for the electronic device calling Director Kondraki to an emergency a hand shoves him back down onto the bed and the phone is picked up by the fifth ring. The voice is a high tenor. It speaks with confidence and understanding and the Director part of Kondraki keeps pulling his consciousness to the surface, saying  _ you need to listen, you need to pay attention, there will be papers to sign and reports to write and shit to do,  _ but words slip into words slip into words until all it is a string of noises in the background. His chest stings and the coughing fits that come over him wrack his body and leave him wheezing and he lays there helplessly and lets them happen and eventually the words he  _ can  _ make out are directed at him and are saying  _ Ben, are you still awake?  _ And Director Kondraki means to respond but doesn’t, not through the haze of half-sleep and fever. 

He feels his glasses being pulled off his face and folded neatly on his nightstand, blankets pulled up to his throat. It almost lulls him fully into sleep when he hears the soft metallic clink of his key ring being slowly extracted from his backpack and there’s a soaring lurch in his chest saying  _ SOMEONE IS TAKING YOUR KEYS YOU NEED TO WAKE UP NOW RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW  _ and he means to throw out an arm and break some bones because those fucking keys are the keys to half the site, all in brass and titanium and some gleaming with circuitry in the teeth and big and small, about 15 total, all unlabelled, some dummies, some made to set off alarms if used incorrectly and they were  _ his  _ goddamn it and they were  _ important- _

 

“My  _ keys,”  _ he ends up croaking pathetically instead of actually doing anything to stop it as he usually would, “don’t. Don’t  _ take  _ those,” 

 

“I’ll bring them back, Ben.”

 

“Bullshit,” wheezes Kondraki. “I swear to god, I’ll…” 

 

“I didn’t know you were so up and ready to run down twelve flights to turn off the silent alarm,” Clef responds. “Which one is it again?” 

 

“...Silent…,” he mumbles, thoughts dragging and slurring behind him. Silent alarm. Silent alarm. Which key was that? “...Ah...what does the 9th one there look like?” 

 

“From what side?” 

 

“...What?” 

 

“The 9th one in. Counting from which side of the ring?” 

 

“What...it’s…” Ben strains to remember; usually he just did it by muscle memory. “...it’s...it’s blue…” 

 

There’s the sound of keys being shuffled through roughly for a moment. 

 

“Okay.” Clef says. “I’ll be back in a second.” 

 

Ben lets out a tired, half-hearted grunt in response. He falls back into fever dreams before Clef shuts the door behind him.

 

* * *

 

 

The butterflies are eating the corpse that lays there rotting. 

 

They aren’t just any butterflies, either, they’re  _ his  _ butterflies, the ones that never seem to go away. 408 was a clingy thing, and a swift, silent thing, but more than anything it was a lethal thing, a hungry thing. A hive mind. An entity. 

 

The man was shot, probably, initially. He can see it in the splatter of dried blood on the wall behind him when Ben shines his headlamp in that direction and sees the soft shadows of sapient entity SCP-408 fluttering softly in the light, but when he looks down, they’re all planted firmly on the body like a living, writhing mass of meat, suckling, content. Not their preferred meal, he knew, but it was something they did from time to time, and Ben, now, post-breach, filthy and covered in blood, wandering from room to room with water from broken water pipes flooded up to his ankles, he looks at them sleep-deprived, trembling,  _ this isn’t the strangest thing I’ve seen in the past few days but it isn’t normal for you, either,  _ and in the back of his mind he thinks  _ vultures, all of them.  _

 

_ Vultures.  _

 

Ben wakes up to six tiny legs crawling on his exposed ear. When he starts to cough, it flutters up onto the headboard, and he sees it in its entirety; only one, a larger flock member, all iridescent green and shimmering wings, flickering, balancing. If he didn’t feel like he was dying, he might have appreciated the aesthetics of the individual more, but in this particular moment he wishes it had just let him sleep. 

 

“Go away.” He groans. The scout waits until he has himself settled again in the blankets, then flutters back down to rest in his hair. Although working with 408 initiated a host of curiosities that excited Kondraki without end on a normal basis- it’s investigative nature, the communication element, even the way it moved and oriented itself- it was moments like these, with a single individual taking the form of a queen alexandra's birdwing licking feverish sweat out of his hair with a three fucking inch long hairy proboscis at 2am, that he almost wished it was less attached to him then it was. Even staying in containment with the rest of the flock where it belonged instead of fluttering around his apartment aimlessly would be an improvement at this point, but the single individual held an important indication; they were watching him, studying him, collecting information. What the butterflies found interesting or important about his current state he didn’t know, but he could always ask them later. Preferably when he didn’t feel like his lungs were burning. 

 

“I’m not in the  _ mood,”  _ Ben huffs, and pushes one hand through his hair. The butterfly takes off in flight, this time landing neatly on his nightstand. He watches it’s silhouette in the dark; wings folded back, crawling on his laptop, his glasses, his service pistol- and rolls his eyes when he sees what it’s after. 

 

“You’re not gonna like it,” he croaks, watching the insect making it’s way up the side of the bottle of over the counter cough medicine left over from when he had been drinking it out of necessity, one of those I’ve-been-up-for-24-hours-already-and-am-about-to-be-up-for-another-48 actions that he did in the 20 minutes he had between shifts; it’s almost empty, but there’s a small amount of residue left on the lip. “It’s not sweet. It tastes like shit.” 

 

He had a feeling that it could hear him- the butterflies were relatively attentive listeners most of the time- but also had a feeling that it was too curious to avoid it. Sure enough, the insect’s proboscis tastes the rim of the plastic bottle for a grand total of three seconds before it flutters down in disgust. 

 

“Told you,” He rasps. It flies back into his hair, and this time he’s too tired to care until it crawls onto his forehead, licking persistently.

 

_ The shit I have to do around here,  _ he thinks to himself. Ben lays in bed for a moment more, relishing the warm dark of the room, then takes a deep breath and flips off the covers. It’s freezing, but then again he isn’t sure what he expected from a high fever if he didn’t expect the rapid temperature fluctuations that came with it; what’s worse is the ache in his joints when he walks and the kitchen’s searing light from overhead when he flips it on. He can still feel the butterfly crawling in his hair when he pours a couple tablespoons of sugar into a saucer and unceremoniously adds water from the kitchen tap. 

 

“There,” he wheezes. Some of the sugar water sloshes over the side when he drops it unenthusiastically onto the counter. “Happy now?” 

 

_ YES,  _ proclaims the letters that appear on the butterfly’s wings as it settles in on the side of the dish. Ben leans heavily on the counter and glances around the kitchen, thinking vaguely of something for himself, but the idea of food makes his stomach turn and he quickly decides against it. 

 

“I’m going back to bed,” He says. “You’re an asshole. I’m on med leave.” 

 

The butterfly doesn’t reply, and it occurs to his fever-ravaged mind that it was because it was separated from the rest of the flock, which was a damn shame, because the 408 flock made great company. Why this one breached he wasn’t sure. The logical idea was that it latched on his clothes the last time he left the aviary, the morning he passed out- but this would mean that it had stayed with him in the hospital, too, which was unlikely, because 408 ate once a day. 

 

Which meant that the flock sent it to check on him when he didn’t show up for a few days without alerting them beforehand. 

 

God, he was a shitty person. 

 

“Look,” He says, running a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry.” 

 

The butterfly’s wings folded, then unfolded again, void of letters and attentive. It rolled up its proboscis from the dish of sugar water with a flick. Ben sighed. 

 

“I’m sick,” he explained. “I would have come to tell you, but it kind of knocked me off my feet for a couple days. I’ll be back at work in a week or so.” 

 

It froze for a moment, absorbing the information, then folded up it’s wings thoughtfully. This was the challenge with having a site of sapient and humanoid entities; it was never just you. They noticed when you were gone. They noticed when things changed. They were smart. They asked questions and explored, and it was challenging and exhilarating and exciting and also so, so painful, because you knew their problems, knew things they wanted and things they hated. Some were even your friends, with the right amount of diligence. This could be a double edged sword. 

 

The butterfly opened it’s wings.  _ YES,  _ they said. 

 

“I’m sorry.” 

 

Fold, unfold.  _ SORRY YES-  _ it quickly folded them back up, as if it had made a typo, then unfolded to reveal  _ ALSO SORRY.  _

 

Ben shakes his head, guilt coiling in his stomach. 

 

“Don’t be,” he says, and he means it. “It kind of threw both of us off.”  

 

_ YES  _ flashes again, then disappears. 

 

“Okay.” He sighs, and runs his hands through his hair, curled up in strange directions from bedhead. “I’m...going back to sleep. I’m assuming you can find your way back?” 

 

_ YES. YES.  _ Says 408, proboscis back in the dish of sugar water. It displays words with softly flapping wings in white kitchen light. He smiles and walks to the door, and instead of opening it reaches up one arm and feels along the middle in the dark of the apartment until his fingers hit a tiny latch; he pops it open with his thumb, and the vent he installed opens in a series of four tiny slats. Technically you weren't supposed to do that kind of work to the Foundation-owned dormitories, but 408 was a hive mind; hard to keep together and harder to leave apart. They worked best around open spaces, determining their own flight path and making their own decisions. Light floods in through the openings from the hallway and brings back a faint memory of the morning he came home from the hospital; Clef locking the door behind them, then reaching up to lock the vents closed, too, and he doesn’t protest because he knows why he did it, why it was reasonable in the waning hours of the morning with Kondraki struggling to breathe. 

 

_ Sometimes, you need to step away from it.  _

 

Their work took many forms. It was frustrating one moment and exciting the next, drinking to celebrate but also drinking to mourn and drinking to relax and drinking to soothe anger and drinking, usually, drinking just to fall asleep at night, that was the way things were. Because when he looked at 408 he saw a friend, but also saw all the bars and all the paperwork and all the blood and the phone calls at 1am and the fear that comes with body bags on a weekday morning and all those things, and sometimes, you need to step away from all of it, regardless of if it helps or not. Sometimes you need to lock the door behind you and lock the vents with it. Sometimes you need to scream at your boyfriend when he reaches to turn out the light. Sometimes you need to know for  _ certain  _ that it is only the two of you in the bedroom and no one else, not anything else, not anything else from out  _ there,  _ nothing from the command room or from the labs or from the containment wings and for twenty minutes let yourself sob feverishly, emotions grinding down in exhaustion and illness, moving in hot waves between anger and frustration and utmost sorrow and the all too familiar feeling of not being able to stop that ten thousand bad things that happened in the past three weeks (although you have done twenty thousand things correctly) and you need to pass out knowing that the only one who will see you break is someone you do not have to explain the breaking to. 

 

All things considered, he was glad that Clef shut the vents and locked the door before he let him start screaming. 

 

As for the 408 individual- they probably hitched a ride in on Clef, who they knew lived with him, which was surprising considering that 408 never seemed incredibly enthusiastic about Clef regardless of the time that passed. 

 

_ That’ll have to change if we’re ever going to get- _

 

Oh, fuck, he wasn’t thinking about that right now. Like there was even the time. And it didn’t make sense, and what would Draven think about having a Stepdad, and what would Draven think about having  _ Clef  _ as his Stepdad, and there was always that thing with either of them maybe dying anyway, or maybe that happening would change things for them and it wouldn’t be like the two of them hanging out anymore, and they had their arguments that were so often explosive, and the last marriage Kondraki had with Draven’s mom nearly two decades ago ended so badly and it tore him up for years, never even considered dating anyone until Draven had been grown up and out of the house, and they broke up a few times but always got back together, and then there was the butterflies, he thinks, as the 408 specimen lands softly on the door and climbs gracefully out the vent into the hallway. He watches it take flight just before it hitting the ground, and his visitor swoops away, out of sight. Kondraki locks the vent behind it. 

 

Oh, and there was always the damn butterflies.


	3. Other Reasons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few days before Kondraki collapses, a fruitful 3am discussion takes place.

_ It’s late at night when he comes to bed, and Clef hears him sneak in on raspy breath, feels him sit down when the mattress sinks slightly on his side. He’s been drinking; Alto can smell it on him with the sharp tang of fever and the sweet smell of cough medicine clinging to his skin. The past few weeks have been rough. This is the first few hours of rest that Ben will be getting in nearly two days, and that was just how it was in this line of work; long shifts and long hours blending into sleepless murk. He wishes he could stop this, watching his partner remove earpiece, blackberry, silenced walkie talkie- a menagerie of small items connecting him to his site. He wishes it would be easier, or get easier, or just take some mercy for a goddamn second to let him catch his breath, and the job just never stops. The Foundation is a bitch that way.  _

 

_ “Why the hell are you wet?” Clef says as he turns on his lamp and blinks sleep out of his eyes. His partner’s work clothes slicked to his body and beads of water glimmer on the edges of his grey-streaked hair.  _

 

_ “‘S fucking pouring out there. The Jeep-” Ben wheezes and coughs sharply, dropping one shoe to the floor with an air of distaste for his general situation, “-I was at one of the outposts for a while tonight and driving back the Jeep had a flat tire.”  _

 

_ “Shit, Ben, you should have called me-” Kondraki waves him off.  _

 

_ “Wasn’t bad.” Ben says, untying his other shoe. “Took maybe ten minutes.”  _

 

_ “Ten minutes in the rain is ten minutes in the rain. You have a coat?”  _

 

_ “Sweatshirt.” Ben says as if it qualifies. His voice is gaining a tired, grainy hoarseness that makes him sound like more of a smoker than he already is.  _

_ “Were you alone?” Alto gets out of bed and notices that it  _ is  _ raining- he feels it creaking in a few old task force wounds, and the sound of water dripping drop by drop into a bucket in the hallway outside. “Should have had someone else do it.”  _

 

_ “The others rode back in one of the task force vans,” Kondraki coughs again. “Could have been worse, you know. I could have been driving away from a breach or something.”  _

 

_ “It always could be worse. Here,” Clef pulls a towel out from the dresser, and tosses it onto the bed. In a few moments, he follows with clean clothes- sweatpants and a shirt. “Dry off and change. Shit, you look like you’re fucking freezing.”  _

 

_ To his surprise, Ben doesn’t resist; he sets his baseball cap and glasses on the nightstand and goes about drying his hair and face, then starts to undress in the shadowy light of their bedroom. His skin is pale, but his cheeks are flushed and eyes glimmering. _

 

_ “You’ve got a fever still.” Clef observes.  _

 

_ “Don’t tell me it’s that obvious.” He smiles sheepishly. “It’s not so bad that I don’t think I can sleep it off.”  _

 

_ “You need time to sleep to sleep it off,” Alto responds, looking at the clock. “It’s 3am already. Blue shift is at 7.”  _

 

_ “That’s a solid three hours of sleep. I’ve slept off a broken rib on two.”  _

 

_ Clef snorted a laugh. “That’s not sleeping it off, that’s called hard whisky and determination.”  _

 

_ “You act like that’s not what I’m running off of right now.”  _

 

_ “Well I damn well hope not, knowing that you were just driving.”  _

 

_ “Hey, I was being careful-” Ben cuts off suddenly and starts to cough; thinly at first, then gaining into a deep, tight fit that ends a couple minutes later with him doubled over on the edge of the bed, breathing hard in the early morning dark. He sounds awful, and if he wasn’t the director of the site they inhabited Alto might have ventured harder to make him stay home, to give up all the phone calls and paging and god-knows-what-else for a couple days in favor of paying off the sleep debt he’d accumulated in the past few weeks since he’d been sick; he looks over his partner, still shivering slightly in his dry clothes, and wonders how much whisky and determination it had taken him to get this far, to not only work in the field until well into the night but to drive home soaking wet and exhausted with a fever.  _

 

_ “You okay?” He asks, climbing back into bed. He can’t see Ben’s expression to know if he’s lying when he nods. Clef passes him the water bottle on his nightstand, and in another strange change from his partner’s normal behavior he accepts it and drinks half of it as he sits recovering on the side of the bed, alternating between slowing his breathing from the fit and drinking deeply from the bottle.  _

 

_ “About that outpost,” Clef says. “How far out was that?”  _

 

_ Kondraki taps the bottle with his fingers, estimating.  _

 

_ “An hour, maybe 45 minutes, not counting the tire. It’s on the shore. Mostly gravel roads.”  _

 

_ Clef shakes his head. “Should have just stayed out there for the night. You’re not in great driving condition.”  _

 

_ “I don’t think I drank as much whisky as you think I did-”  _

 

_ “-That’s not what I meant,” He says. “Ben, you’re a mess right now. I say that with love.”  _

 

_ Ben- who had spent many years on the field as a grad student photographer for the Foundation- was certainly no stranger to sleeping in the back of the Jeep if he found himself incapacitated, or otherwise too damn tired to drive in general. Probably wasn’t the best security as a Director, but he’d had no problems yet, and both of them always would rather he stay where he was than try to drive in shitty conditions.  _

 

_ Ben shook his head. “I’d have to drive back for blue shift anyway. And you know, with the mud how it is, I’d rather not risk getting stranded. And it’s fucking freezing out there to boot. All that among other reasons.”  _

 

_ “Other reasons?”  _

 

_ Ben set the water bottle down on his nightstand and sighed. “Yes. Other reasons. I don’t need to justify myself to you.”  _

 

_ “Did you need to take a shit?”  _

 

_ “Oh, fuck off! I can shit in the woods if I need to.”  _

 

_ “I thought so, but I wasn’t really about to ask.”  _

 

_ “Well, it  _ is  _ an acquired skill set. I don’t know what you GOC boys are accustomed to doing.” His voice cracks sharply at the end, and he clears his throat and takes another drink of water.  _

 

_ “An acquired skill set? What did you do, take an online course?”  _

 

_ “Don’t make fun of my doctoral dissertation topic like that, Alto.” Ben says, deadpan, screwing the cap back on the water bottle. Alto can’t contain his laughter in response. Kondraki smiles weakly in the warm light, and throws back the blankets, mumbling to him to move over.  _

 

_ “You must be pretty sick not to laugh at your own poop joke.” He says, only half joking, as Ben climbs clumsily into bed.  _

 

_ “Not sick,” He mumbles in reply. “Just tired.”  _

 

_ “You look tired.” Alto says, turning out the light.  _

 

_ Alto runs a hand through his partner’s hair. He’s shivering and warm to the touch. _

 

Other reasons. 

 

He wanted to be here with you,  _ says a more romantic part of Alto that he tries to repress by all means possible.  _ He was sick and tired and drove 45 minutes in the rain because he didn’t want to be all alone out there like that, not even for a few hours.  _ Alto continues to play with his hair, then starts rubbing his partner’s upper back, feeling the rise and fall of his chest and the quiet wheeze of his breath that comes with it. The sickly fever heat radiating through his shirt is the same heat that has him in a fretful sleep in minutes.  _ Up in three hours,  _ Alto thinks.  _ Who knows how long until he gets to sleep again. 

 

He wanted to spend those three hours asleep in a real bed with you.

 

* * *

 

_ Alto’s alarm for blue shift goes off in the blink of an eye. Ben sleeps through it. After intense internal debate over just calling him in sick and dealing with the crumbling world it would obviously cause later, he makes a compromise with himself and lets his partner sleep in an extra twenty minutes before shaking him awake, at which point Kondraki drags himself up, downs enough aspirin and cough medicine to kill an elderly person, showers to get the dried mud off his arms from the night before, and dresses himself in clothes that aren’t soaking wet. Alto checks in on him again, briefly- pokes his head back in the bedroom to make sure he was still awake and still alive- and finds him silhouetted on the edge of the bed, drinking straight from a familiar-looking bottle in place of his regular black coffee and coughing between gulps of it. The rain the night before clearly hadn't done him any favors.  _

 

_ Whisky and determination. Whisky and determination. That was how you survived here as a Level 4.   _

 

_ It’s four days before Kondraki collapses.  _


End file.
